Sunday, October 29, 2006
Required Articles
Please read the following article by Nov. 8th
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2896
The False Debate Over 'Broken Borders'
When pro-business passes as pro-immigrant
By Saurav Sarkar
Since 2005, much of the mainstream media has been rife with coverage of what has been called “immigration reform”—a policy debate over what kind of immigration legislation would be passed among a narrow range of options. One pole of the legislative debate was the McCain-Kennedy proposal, which would have created a temporary or “guest” worker program, followed by conditional and heavily delayed legalization of workers. The other was the Sensenbrenner Bill, passed by the House in December 2005, which would, among other harsh provisions, turn undocumented immigrants into felons and massively increase detentions and deportations.
Either measure by itself would be the biggest change in U.S. immigration law since 1996, when Congress restricted economic and legal benefits for immigrants, and vastly expanded grounds for deportation and detention of immigrants. There has not been an amnesty or other large-scale legalization of the millions of undocumented people in the United States since 1986. The information that the American public is receiving is therefore of enormous and direct consequence to tens of millions of people and indirectly to billions.
As an example of how immigration policies affect people around the world, the World Bank’s 2003 Global Development Finance report noted:
Remittance flows [from immigrant workers] are the second-largest source, behind FDI [foreign direct investment], of external funding for developing countries. In 2001, workers’ remittance receipts of developing countries stood at $72.3 billion, much higher than total official flows and private non-FDI flows, and 42 percent of total FDI flows to developing countries.
Unfortunately, despite the global significance of immigration legislation and immeasurable effects on individual lives, there have been deep flaws in media coverage of the legislative debate. In particular, large segments of the media have biased their coverage towards a pro-business standpoint on the debate, which is misleadingly portrayed as a pro-immigrant position; the opposition to this view is a racialized, nativist perspective that is misrepresented as advocacy for U.S.-born workers. Actual pro-immigrant, pro-worker and international points of view have been almost entirely absent.
Constructing a false dichotomy between the harsh nativist measures being considered by the House of Representatives and the more business-friendly measures endorsed by the Senate, the media have also fostered an unjustified sense of urgency to promote sweeping legislation that is likely to end up harming immigrants and non-immigrant U.S. workers alike.
Buying into the spin
Mainstream media have helped to set the terms of the debate by endlessly repeating catchphrases and buzzwords like “porous borders” and “comprehensive immigration reform.” Consider the adjective “broken,” widely used to describe the current immigration system. The New York Times editorialized last year (9/26/05) on “American’s broken immigration policy,” calling the system “unsafe and unfair.” The Denver Post (3/9/06) and Miami Herald (3/6/06) editorialized against the “broken immigration system.” The Des Moines Register (8/28/05) declared, “The current immigration system is clearly broken, as evidenced by the estimated 11 million immigrants in the United States without documentation.”
Some outlets have chosen to describe the situation as a “crisis” instead. CNN’s Lou Dobbs (4/13/06), in a frequent refrain, said that the United States “is facing an unprecedented immigration and border security crisis.” The American Prospect’s November 2005 issue was likewise devoted to “Solving the Immigration Crisis” (subhead: “The Road to Comprehensive Reform”).
This alleged immigration “crisis” seems to have been going on for at least a decade. In a July 1996 letter to the New York Times (7/11/96), Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson referred to “the nation’s immigration crisis,” during a year in which Congress passed bills to extensively increase jailing and deportations and deny financial benefits to both documented and undocumented immigrants. But this history of crisis rhetoric—which recalls similar talk during the Social Security debate and the leadup to the Iraq War—did not spark questions about what exactly the current “crisis” consists of.
The urgency of reform
Once the media accepted that the system is “broken” or in “crisis,” they quickly moved to the conclusion that a solution is urgently needed and began to cheerlead. In describing the current effort to pass legislation related to immigration, much of the media coverage has adopted the word “reform”—and thereby promoted support for immediate legislative action. According to a Google News search of U.S. sources (3/18/06), in the 30 days prior, 2,540 media pieces used the phrase “immigration reform.” In comparison, only 1,210 used the more neutral phrase “immigration bill,” and only 687 used the phrase “immigration legislation.”
“Immigration reform” generally consisted of some variation on the contents of the McCain-Kennedy proposal—legislation that would create a permanent class of second-class workers while establishing a heavily delayed and conditional legalization program, usually referred to as “earned legalization” or “a path to citizenship,” along with harsher enforcement measures at the border.
“A get-tough enforcement strategy should be coupled with move toward a guest-worker program,” editorialized the San Jose Mercury News (3/19/06). “Immigration reform legislation being debated in Congress must regulate the flow of migration and tie it to U.S. labor needs,” declared the Baltimore Sun (3/7/06).
60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley said in a CBS News “Reporter’s Notebook” (CBSNews.com, 12/9/05) that the only way to “stem the tide of illegal immigration” would be to “go to where illegal migrants are working and kick them out” or “come up with some kind of effective guest-worker program.”
Nativist views like those of CNN’s Dobbs (see page 22) and the House of Representatives provided a useful foil to the preferred corporate media solution of “guestworkers.” The result was a narrow public discussion reflecting the terms set by policymakers and lobbyists for business interests, with sops to immigration restrictionists, including increased surveillance and force at the Mexican border, with no remedies for the criminalization and workplace exploitation of immigrants.
The New York Times (5/21/05) summed up this debate: “The arrival last week in the U.S. Congress of a sweeping, bipartisan immigration proposal brought forth the usual conflict between those who want a solution and those who just want an emotional issue to howl about.” The Times was distinguishing between those who accept the business-friendly “reform” proposal and the nativists who reject such a plan; those who see a two-tiered workforce divided by citizenship as not being in the interests of either immigrants or native-born workers are entirely out of the picture.
Selective coverage
News columns as well as opinion commentary attempted to enforce this truncated debate. Consider “U.S. Bill to Broaden Immigration Law Gains in Senate” (3/28/06) by Rachel Swarns, the New York Times beat reporter on the subject. The article covered—and promoted—the late March compromise reached in the Senate Judiciary Committee that used portions of the McCain-Kennedy bill in combination with more restrictionist provisions.
Swarns emphasized that the bill would “legalize the United States’ 11 million illegal immigrants and ultimately . . . grant them citizenship” (if they meet certain conditions), and would “allow roughly 400,000 foreigners to come to the United States to work each year and would put them on a path to citizenship as well.” She reported that the plan “was quickly hailed by Democrats, a handful of Republicans and business leaders, as well as by the immigrant advocacy organizations and church groups that have sent tens of thousands of supporters of immigrant rights into the streets of a number of cities to push for such legislation in recent days.”
Swarns mentioned that the bill “includes provisions to strengthen border security,” and much farther down in the article pointed out that the legislation “would nearly double the number of Border Patrol agents over the next five years, criminalize the construction of tunnels into the United States from another country and speed the deportation of illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico.”
But Swarns missed some other aspects of the Senate Judiciary bill that were later pointed out by the Immigrant Defense Project of the New York State Defenders Association (3/31/06): The bill would expand the types of criminal offenses that lead to mandatory jailing and deportation, allow lifetime detention of immigrants who cannot be deported, fund an additional 10,000 detention beds for immigrants and increase anti-immigrant cooperation between local and federal police.
Nancy Morawetz, a New York University law professor who is sympathetic to immigrants, says that this is a general trend in media coverage. In an email, she points to “lack of attention to unnecessary, inhumane and costly detention policies; restrictions on access to the courts; increase in mandatory grounds for removing noncitizens with status who have been residents most of their lives; [and] criminalization of the undocumented.”
Missing voices
Meanwhile, progressive pro-worker, pro-immigrant or international perspectives have been almost completely absent. For example, with all of the discussion of how the immigration system is “broken,” there has been scant coverage on the massive increase in jailing and deportations in the past 10 years, something that would likely have been brought up had progressive organizations like the Immigrant Defense Project been represented.
Despite Swarns’ claim that the Senate Judiciary bill was “hailed by . . . immigrant advocacy organizations,” many local progressive organizations have publicly objected to various provisions or the entire legislative approach, though their complaints were practically uncited. These include the Break the Chains Coalition, Chinese Staff and Workers Association, Families For Freedom, Friends of Farmworkers and the Drum Major Institute, just to name a few who have presence in the northeastern United States. Though they objected from a variety of perspectives and offered a variety of proposals as fixes, these organizations received a total of four hits in a Google News search of U.S.-based sources for the 30 days prior to March 19, before the massive rally in Los Angeles began calling media attention to immigrant activism.
Instead of viewpoints from such critical groups, or pro-immigrant experts like Morawetz, those who have been selected by the media to represent the “pro-immigrant” side of this debate are generally people like Frank Sharry, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum.
The National Immigration Forum is a pro-immigration lobbying group based in Washington, D.C. It has played a lead role in bringing immigrant groups and unions to support the business-friendly McCain-Kennedy bill, even going so far as to say that it is too light on enforcement provisions (American Prospect, 11/05). A Google News search on March 19 shows that, in the prior 30 days, 98 pieces from U.S.-based sources contained the phrases “National Immigration Forum” and “immigration reform.” On the other hand, the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights—one of the few national pro-immigrant organizations that consistently refused to endorse any of the existing legislative options—received no hits for an analogous search.
Inclusion of a greater diversity of “pro-immigrant” sources might have shifted the focus from D.C. politics to a fuller description of the substance and potential impact of these proposals. The ethnic press has done a better job of this. Consider “McCain Against Amnesty,” a recent cover story in Caribbean Life (3/7/06). The article, covering a rally organized by immigrant lobbyists, states that McCain was “clearly out of touch with the true state of affairs” in New York, because he “spoke as though it’s very easy for immigrants to find affordable English language classes, legal representation, etc.” This level of detail on the real-world effects of the media’s preferred solution on immigrants is virtually absent in mainstream newspaper pages.
In general, the ethnic press has offered a level of detail on immigrant lives that the mainstream media has simply ignored. For example, the March 6 issue of El Diario/La Prensa reported that there has been a 78 percent rise in deportation orders over the past five years, including over 220,000 orders in 2005 alone.
From the replication of the terms of the debate from Washington to the creation of an artificial sense of urgency to pass a bill to the backing of business-friendly proposals that would assist immigrants insofar as they provide cheap labor, segments of the mainstream media did little to serve immigrants, native-born U.S. workers or people in the rest of the world. Only with the shock of the massive demonstration in Los Angeles and elsewhere have the mainstream media finally begun to notice immigrant perspectives that go significantly beyond asking for guestworker status.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2896
ZNet | Activism
The Kennedy-McCain Bill
by Suvrat Raju; May 16, 2006
The past two months have witnessed an explosion in the immigrant rights movement in America. When Representative Sensenbrenner introduced his bill, proposing the large scale deportation of undocumented immigrants, little did he suspect that millions of people would come out on the streets in protest. Los Angeles and Chicago saw the largest demonstrations in their history. Soon other cities followed suit. This movement, full of energy and enthusiasm, holds out the promise of radically changing America.
Predictably, conservative sections of the immigrant leadership have tried to rein in the militant tendencies of this popular outburst. Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles, explained that May 1st could be a made a 'win-win ' day [1] while urging workers to reject calls for a nationwide strike! Earlier, Mahony had written “Only comprehensive reform ... embodied in the principles of ... the Secure America and Orderly Immigration bill, will help solve our current immigration crisis.” [2] In this article, I will attempt to analyze this viewpoint. I will argue that the “Secure America and Order Immigration bill” introduced by Kennedy and McCain is deeply flawed and it would be a serious mistake for the immigrant rights movement to look to this piece of legislation for relief.
A good summary of the Kennedy-McCain(K-M) proposals may be found at the Library of Congress website [3]. Briefly, the bill establishes a new visa type to facilitate future legal immigration. It also offers undocumented immigrants, already present in the country, an opportunity to legalize their status for 6 years with a chance at permanent residency later. While introducing the bill, McCain said ”Homeland security is our nation's number one priority” [4] and, indeed the first section of the bill deals with increased border security.
A quick look at the actual provisions of the bill [5] reveals serious problems. First, consider the opportunities for future legal immigration. The bill proposes the creation of 400,000 new H5-A visas for 'low-skilled workers'. However, according to the latest data compiled by the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of undocumented immigrants over the past 5 years averaged 850,000 per year [6]. Even assuming a steady rate of increase in the number of visas by 15% each year, it will take at least 6 years for the number of visas to catch up with the number of immigrants. Unless, K-M plan to apprehend and turn back hundreds of thousands of people at the border, in a few years there will be several million additional undocumented workers in the US.
Second, the bill ties legal status in the US to employment. If a person is unemployed for 45 days, s/he must leave the country. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics [7], 10.9% of the Hispanic workforce was unemployed at some point during 2004, with the median length of unemployment being 16 weeks(112 days). Within a few years, there would be several million H-5A immigrants in the US. Hence, the 45 day provision would put two to three hundred thousand people at risk of deportation each year [8]. This estimate is quite possibly conservative since it is well known that young workers are subject to a greater incidence of unemployment than older workers [9] and the H-5A population is likely to be younger than the rest of the Hispanic population.
Third consider the clauses dealing with family uni?cation. Currently, US laws place per-country limits on family sponsored visas [10]. Not more than 33,600 family preference visas per year may be given to any one country. The K-M bill raises this limit to 48,000. Given that half a million Mexicans migrate into the US each year, this reform is grossly inadequate.
The senators recognized, probably intuitively, that any attempt at large-scale deportation would be foolish. So, the bill legalizes the presence of undocumented immigrants in the US for a period of up to six years by granting them the status of 'H5-B non-immigrants'. It is hard to critique this in detail, since the exact modalities of the 'H5-B' visa are somewhat unclear. It is evident, nevertheless that this is a recipe for creating second-class citizens who would live in constant fear of losing their status. 'Two offences', according to the Immigration and Nationality Act lead to automatic loss of status [11].
At the end of this mandatory six-year long humiliation, immigrants would be allowed to petition the government for permanent residency. The K-M bill never discusses the issue of accepting the immigrants as full citizens. So, it is a mistake to claim, as some do, that the K-M bill includes a 'path to citizenship'.
In addition to these questions of implementation, the Kennedy-McCain bill overlooks three central issues. First, there is the issue of capitalism! One has often heard, over the past two months, comparisons of the taxes immigrants pay with the social spending they receive. Such comparisons miss the point entirely. As is obvious to any observer of the US economy, under the current (capitalist) system, immigrants are among the most intensely exploited of all workers. This means that while they contribute a lot of labor, the wages they receive in compensation are tiny. If one were to properly tally all the work immigrants do, one would find that it not only overwhelms the proportion of social welfare they receive but is more than enough for them to be provided with comprehensive health-care and many other benefits. In this light, the Kennedy-McCain proposal to ask the Mexican government to foot part of the bill for immigrant health-care is preposterous.
Second, there is the question of imperialism. For the past 200 years, the American government has plundered Latin America and the Caribbean. Capitalist development in North America could not have taken place without the extraction of surplus from other countries. Conversely, this exploitation is also one of the leading causes of poverty in the countries that provide an immigrant population to the US. There is no moral principle that can justify the closure of American borders to victims of American policies.
Third, there is the question of nationalism. A broad argument against current immigration policy must include a radical challenge to the concept of a nation-state. Indeed, imperialist powers have been hypocritically arguing for the past 15 years that human rights supersede sovereignty. I propose that we turn this argument on its head. The right to life and employment is an uncontroversial human right. To accommodate this right, the American nation-state must concede part of its sovereignty.
The perspective, that US imperialism is responsible for immigration and that far from having a right to assert its sovereignty, the US must respect immigrants for the work they do, has immediate consequences. First, it invalidates proposals to militarize the border [12]. Second, it is apparent that the civic-responsibility and English-speaking clauses in the K-M bill are an unacceptable attempt to impose Anglo-Saxon heritage on the immigrant population. Third, K-M's claims to promote economic development in Mexico ring hollow. How can poverty alleviation occur while successive bipartisan administrations continue to push through disastrous free-trade agreements with Mexico? Samir Amin's critique of the millennium development goals is amply applicable here. These proposals are “nothing but empty incantations as long as the policies that generate poverty are not analyzed and denounced and alternatives proposed.” [13]
In summary, the Kennedy McCain bill is a series of insufficient and unworkable proposals. Currently, the Senate and House of Representatives are trying to work out a compromise between the proposals of K-M and Sensenbrenner. Since this compromise will necessarily be worse than K-M, Immigrant rights supporters should reject this move. Rather than relying on minimal legislative reform, we must work to build the movement till it becomes an organized political force capable of winning concessions not only for itself but for people all over the world.
Notes and References
[1] “Positive Action For Positive Change: Suggestions Toward Promoting Immigration Reform On Monday, May 1st, 2006”, Archdiocesan News Archive, April 19,2006
http://www.archdiocese.la/news/story.php?newsid=738
[2] “Called by God to Help”, Roger Mahony, The New York Times, March 22, 2006.
[3] Congressional Record Summary of S1033: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:SN01033:@@@D&summ2=m&
[4] Press Advisory from the O?ce of Senator Kennedy, “Members of Congress Introduce Comprehensive Border Security & Immigration Reform Bill” (May 12,2005).
http://kennedy.senate.gov/ kennedy/statements/05/05/2005512A04.html
[5] Full text of S1033: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:S.1033:
[6] “Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S.” ,Je?rey S. Passel, Pew Hispanic Center, March 2006
http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=61
[7] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/work.t04.htm
[8] If we assume that number of H-5A visas that are given out each year will stabilize at 800,000/year with each visa being valid for 6 years, this leads to an estimate of a stable H-5A population in the US of size 4,800,000. Even if 5% of these workers are threatened with deportation, that number is 240,000.
[9] National Longitudinal Survey of Youth
http://www.bls.gov/nls/y79r20unempbyage.pdf.
[10] See K-M, Title VI: 'Family Unity and Backlog Reduction'.
Also see Immigration and Nationality Act:Section 202(a)
[http://www.uscis.gov/graphics/lawsregs/INA.htm]
[11] See K-M, Title VII: 'H-5B Nonimmigrants' and the Immigration and Nationality Act, Section 212(a)(2). Of course, in line with other paleolithic drug laws, posession of marijuana could also lead to deportation.
[12] In the first section of their bill, Kennedy and McCain gleefully write about the new aerial surveillance technologies they plan to introduce on the border. One must remark on the almost childish fascination that US o?cials share for ineffective high-tech military gadgets.
[13] “The Millennium Development Goals: A Critique from the South”, Samir Amin, Monthly Review, March 2006.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0306amin.htm
Original article is at http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/111714.php Print comments.
Mesoamerica comes to North America: The Dialectics of the Migrant Workers’ Movement
by James Petras Wednesday May 03, 2006 at 07:04 PM
Between March 25 and May 1, 2006 close to 5 million migrant workers and their supporters marched through nearly 100 cities of the United States. This is the biggest and most sustained workers’ demonstration in the history of the US. In all of its 50-year history, the US trade union confederation, the AFL-CIO has never been capable of mobilizing even a fraction of the workers convoked by the migrant workers movement.
Mesoamerica comes to North America: The Dialectics of the Migrant Workers’ Movement
James Petras
Rebelión
Between March 25 and May 1, 2006 close to 5 million migrant workers and their supporters marched through nearly 100 cities of the United States. This is the biggest and most sustained workers’ demonstration in the history of the US. In all of its 50-year history, the US trade union confederation, the AFL-CIO has never been capable of mobilizing even a fraction of the workers convoked by the migrant workers movement. The rise and growth of the movement is rooted in the historical experience of the migrant workers (overwhelmingly from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean), the exploitative and racist experience they confront today in the US and the future in which they face imprisonment, expulsion and dispossession.
The migrant workers movement is engaged in an independent political struggle, directed against local, state and particularly the national government. The movement’s immediate objective is to defeat congressional legislation designed to criminalize employed migrant workers and a “compromise” designed to divide recently arrived workers from older workers. The key demand of the migrant workers is the legalization of all workers, new and old. The choice of direct action methods is a response to the ineffectiveness of the legalistic and lobbying activities of established middle class controlled Latino organizations and the total failure of the labor confederation and its affiliates to organize migrant workers in trade unions or even build solidarity organizations.
To understand the dynamic growth of migrant labor movement in the US and its militancy, it is necessary to analyze the profound structural changes of the 1980’s and 1990’s in Mexico and Central America.
NAFTA, Proxy Wars and Free Markets
Beginning in the 1980’s, the US via the IMF, and its client presidents in Mexico (Salinas, Zedillo and Fox) promoted a “free trade” policy codified in the North American Free Trade Area. This policy opened the door to the massive inflow of heavily subsidized US agricultural commodities undermining local small and medium size farmers. Large-scale foreign investments in retail enterprises, banking and finance led to the bankruptcy of millions of small business people. The growth of free trade industrial zones (maquiladoras) led to the decline of protective social and labor legislation. Foreign debt payments, corrupt privatizations and large-scale growth of precarious employment led to an absolute decline of wage levels, even as the number of Mexican billionaires multiplied. Huge profits and interest payments accruing to US corporations and banks flowed back to the US, as did billions of dollars from corrupt politicians, money laundered by US banks like CITI Corporation.
Displaced and impoverished rural and urban workers soon followed the outward flows of profits and interest. The reasoning according to the “free markets” was that free flows of US capital to Mexico should be accompanied by the free flow of labor, of Mexican workers to the US. But the US did not practice the “free market” doctrine: it pursued a policy of unrestricted entry of capital into Mexico and a restricted policy on labor migration.
The free market policies created a vast reserve army of unemployed and underemployed Mexican labor while the legal restraints on free migration forced the workers to migrate without legal documents.
The huge influx of labor was not simply a result of Mexican or Central American workers seeking higher wages, it was a result of the adverse structural conditions imposed by NAFTA which expelled workers from their workplace. The Mexican free market structure was an ‘empire-centered model of accumulation’, and because it was empire-centered, it became a magnet attracting labor in pursuit of employment in the Empire.
The second major structural feature determining massive migrant worker movements from Central America was the US imperial wars of the 1980’s: the massive US military intervention via proxy armies in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras destroyed the possibility of social reform and viable economies throughout Central America. By financing death squads and promoting “scorched earth” counter-insurgency activity the US drove millions of Central Americans out of the countryside into the squalor of urban slums and overseas to Mexico, the US, Canada and Europe. The US “success” in imposing corrupt right-wing rulers throughout Central America, closed off all options for collective or self-improvement in the domestic economy. The implementation of neo-liberal measures led to even greater unemployment and a sharp decline in social services, forcing many to seek employment in the empire: the source of their misery.
Legacy of Struggle: Migrant Labor Militancy
The first wave of immigrants in the 1980’s in the aftermath of the neo-liberal shock and the military terror sought anonymously any kind of work even under the worst conditions; many hid their militant past but did not forget it. As the flow of migrant workers gained momentum, great concentrations of Latino workers settled in major cities of California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. This led to the creation of a dense network of social, cultural and sports clubs and informal organizations based on previous family, neighborhood and regional ties. New small businesses flourished, consumer power increased, children attended school with clear Latino majorities and numerous radio station were directed to the migrant workers in their own language. Quickly the sense of solidarity grew from the strength of numbers, the facility of communication, the proximity of fellow workers, and above all from the common experience of unregulated and unmitigated exploitation at the hardest jobs and the lowest pay, accompanied by racist attitudes from employers, white workers, police and other public authorities.
The decision by the Congress to add the further threat of imprisonment and mass expulsions occurred at the same time in which the social networks and solidarity within the Latino communities was deepening and expanding. The earlier militancy carried over from the mass popular resistance to the death squads in El Salvador, the taste of freedom and dignity during the Sandinista period in Nicaragua, the multiple militant peasant movements in Mexico came out of the closet and found a new social expression in the mass migrant workers movement.
The convergence of submerged or latent militancy and the demands for labor rights and legal recognition in the new exploitative/repressive context created the impetus for social solidarity of entire communities. Participation included whole families, entire neighborhoods and crossed generational boundaries: high school students joined construction workers, gardeners, garment workers and domestics to fill the streets of Dallas, Texas and Los Angeles, California, with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, much to the surprise of non-Latino observers ignorant of their historical legacy, their powerful social networks and their decision to draw the line now between social existence and massive expulsion.
In summary we cannot understand the massive labor migration from Mexico without examining the massive flow of US capital to Mexico, its destructive impact on the socio-economic relations and the unregulated outflow or remittance of profits and interests back to the US. Likewise we cannot explain the massive long-term flows of labor migrants from Central America to the US without taking into account the massive flow of US arms to the ruling classes of the region, the large-scale destruction of small scale agriculture, the restoration to power of the kleptocratic oligarchies and the reversal of social reforms, especially in Nicaragua.
Central American and Mexican labor migration is a direct result of the victory of the US-led counter-revolution in the region. The emergence of the mass movement of labor migrants, in a sense, is the replay of the earlier struggles between US capital and Mexican and Central American labor on the new terrain of US state politics and with a new set of issues. The continuity of the struggles, in Central America and Mexico and now in the US is found in the common demands for “self-determination” and the common methods of struggle, direct action. This is reflected in the strong working class or ‘popular’ composition of the struggle, and the historical memory of class solidarity.
Significance of the New Mass Migrant Workers Movement (NMMWM)
The emergence of the mass migrant workers’ movement opens a new chapter in the working class struggle both in North America, and Central America. First and foremost it represents the first major upsurge of independent working class struggle in the US after over fifty years of decline, stagnation and retreat by the established trade union confederation. Secondly, NMMWM reveals a new class protagonist (“subject”) as the leading sector in the labor movement, the migrant worker. While in the past the dynamic sectors of organized labor in the private sector (auto, teamsters, steel, and longshore (West Coast)) have lost over 2/3 of their members and now represent only 9% of the private labor force, over 2 million migrant workers demonstrated and manifested the kind of social solidarity, unseen in the US since the 1930’s. Thirdly, NMMWM was organized without a big bureaucratic trade union apparatus, and with a minimum budget on the basis of voluntary workers through horizontal communication. In fact, one of the key factors accounting for the success of the mobilization was that it was largely out of the control of the dead hand of the trade union hierarchy, even as a minority of workers were members of trade unions. Fourthly, the leadership and strategists of the movement were independent of the two major capitalist parties, especially the deadly embrace of the Democratic Party.
Because of their political independence, the NMMWM was in the streets, was critical of both Party policies of expulsion of labor migrants and did not confine itself to the futile action of ‘lobbying politicos’ in the corridors of Congress. The mass migrant workers movement has served, to a certain extent, as a “social pole” attracting and politicizing tens of thousands of high school, community college and even university students especially those of Latin- American origins. In addition, a minority of dissident “Anglo” trade unionists, middle class progressives and clerical liberals has been activated to work with the labor struggles. The NMMWM struggle is political -–directed at influencing political power, national legislation and against the rule of ‘white capital’ directed at criminalizing and expelling ‘brown labor.’
The movement demonstrates the proper approach to combining race and class politics. The emergence of an organized mass labor-based socio-political pole has the potential to create a new political movement, which could challenge the hegemony of the two capitalist parties. The dynamic growth of the migrant workers movement in the US can serve as the basis for an international labor movement (free from the tutelage of the pro-imperialist AFL-CIO) from Panama to the US West, Southwest and southeastern states. Family and ethnic ties can strengthen class solidarity and create the basis of reciprocal support in struggles against the common enemy: the neo-liberal model of capitalism, the repressive state apparatus and legislation South and North.
The positive developments of the NMMWM however face political obstacles to growth and consolidation: First “from the outside” numerous employers fired workers who participated in the first wave of mass demonstrations. Latino workers who were trade unionists received little or no support from the labor bosses.
Secondly, after the mass success of the movements, numerous traditional Latino politicos, social workers, professional consultants, non-governmental organizations and clerical notables jumped on the bandwagon and are active in deflecting the movement into the conventional channels of “petitioning” Congress or supporting the “lesser evil” Democratic Party politicians. These middle class collaborators are intent on dividing the movement to serve their purpose of gaining a political platform for career advancement.
Finally the movement faces the problem of the uneven development of the struggle within the working class and between regions of the country. Most “Anglo workers” are at best passive while probably over half perceive migrant workers as a threat to their jobs, salaries and neighborhoods. The general absence of any anti-racist, class-based education by the trade union bureaucracy makes working class unity a difficult task. The challenge is for the migrant workers to reach out and build coalitions with black, Puerto Rican and Asian workers – as well as a minority of advanced Anglo trade unionists. There is also the pressure from the leaders of the capitalist parties to divide migrant workers, by passing legislation that favors ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ workers, ‘long-term’ versus ‘short-term’ workers, literate versus less literate workers, skilled versus unskilled workers.
Finally there is the need to confront the new wave of large-scale police raids at workplaces and neighborhoods, where hundreds of Latino workers are rounded up and expelled. Today, in Nazi style, entire Latino neighborhoods are closed and the police go on house-to-house searches. The Immigration police have recently escalated their mass ‘round-ups’ at work sites trying to provoke a climate of intimidation. During the week April 21-28, NeoCon Chief of Homeland Security Agency, Michael Chertoff directed the arrest of 1,100 undocumented migrants in 26 states.
Despite these challenges the migrant workers movement is in the ascendancy: on March 25 hundreds of thousands demonstrated; on April 10 over 2 million marched and on May 1, millions more will join massive marches and workers strikes. While the reactionary politicians are holed up in Congress, scheming of new ways to divide and conquer the movement, the Latino people by the millions are in the streets…for their rights, their self-determination and their dignity.
Rebelión
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2896
The False Debate Over 'Broken Borders'
When pro-business passes as pro-immigrant
By Saurav Sarkar
Since 2005, much of the mainstream media has been rife with coverage of what has been called “immigration reform”—a policy debate over what kind of immigration legislation would be passed among a narrow range of options. One pole of the legislative debate was the McCain-Kennedy proposal, which would have created a temporary or “guest” worker program, followed by conditional and heavily delayed legalization of workers. The other was the Sensenbrenner Bill, passed by the House in December 2005, which would, among other harsh provisions, turn undocumented immigrants into felons and massively increase detentions and deportations.
Either measure by itself would be the biggest change in U.S. immigration law since 1996, when Congress restricted economic and legal benefits for immigrants, and vastly expanded grounds for deportation and detention of immigrants. There has not been an amnesty or other large-scale legalization of the millions of undocumented people in the United States since 1986. The information that the American public is receiving is therefore of enormous and direct consequence to tens of millions of people and indirectly to billions.
As an example of how immigration policies affect people around the world, the World Bank’s 2003 Global Development Finance report noted:
Remittance flows [from immigrant workers] are the second-largest source, behind FDI [foreign direct investment], of external funding for developing countries. In 2001, workers’ remittance receipts of developing countries stood at $72.3 billion, much higher than total official flows and private non-FDI flows, and 42 percent of total FDI flows to developing countries.
Unfortunately, despite the global significance of immigration legislation and immeasurable effects on individual lives, there have been deep flaws in media coverage of the legislative debate. In particular, large segments of the media have biased their coverage towards a pro-business standpoint on the debate, which is misleadingly portrayed as a pro-immigrant position; the opposition to this view is a racialized, nativist perspective that is misrepresented as advocacy for U.S.-born workers. Actual pro-immigrant, pro-worker and international points of view have been almost entirely absent.
Constructing a false dichotomy between the harsh nativist measures being considered by the House of Representatives and the more business-friendly measures endorsed by the Senate, the media have also fostered an unjustified sense of urgency to promote sweeping legislation that is likely to end up harming immigrants and non-immigrant U.S. workers alike.
Buying into the spin
Mainstream media have helped to set the terms of the debate by endlessly repeating catchphrases and buzzwords like “porous borders” and “comprehensive immigration reform.” Consider the adjective “broken,” widely used to describe the current immigration system. The New York Times editorialized last year (9/26/05) on “American’s broken immigration policy,” calling the system “unsafe and unfair.” The Denver Post (3/9/06) and Miami Herald (3/6/06) editorialized against the “broken immigration system.” The Des Moines Register (8/28/05) declared, “The current immigration system is clearly broken, as evidenced by the estimated 11 million immigrants in the United States without documentation.”
Some outlets have chosen to describe the situation as a “crisis” instead. CNN’s Lou Dobbs (4/13/06), in a frequent refrain, said that the United States “is facing an unprecedented immigration and border security crisis.” The American Prospect’s November 2005 issue was likewise devoted to “Solving the Immigration Crisis” (subhead: “The Road to Comprehensive Reform”).
This alleged immigration “crisis” seems to have been going on for at least a decade. In a July 1996 letter to the New York Times (7/11/96), Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson referred to “the nation’s immigration crisis,” during a year in which Congress passed bills to extensively increase jailing and deportations and deny financial benefits to both documented and undocumented immigrants. But this history of crisis rhetoric—which recalls similar talk during the Social Security debate and the leadup to the Iraq War—did not spark questions about what exactly the current “crisis” consists of.
The urgency of reform
Once the media accepted that the system is “broken” or in “crisis,” they quickly moved to the conclusion that a solution is urgently needed and began to cheerlead. In describing the current effort to pass legislation related to immigration, much of the media coverage has adopted the word “reform”—and thereby promoted support for immediate legislative action. According to a Google News search of U.S. sources (3/18/06), in the 30 days prior, 2,540 media pieces used the phrase “immigration reform.” In comparison, only 1,210 used the more neutral phrase “immigration bill,” and only 687 used the phrase “immigration legislation.”
“Immigration reform” generally consisted of some variation on the contents of the McCain-Kennedy proposal—legislation that would create a permanent class of second-class workers while establishing a heavily delayed and conditional legalization program, usually referred to as “earned legalization” or “a path to citizenship,” along with harsher enforcement measures at the border.
“A get-tough enforcement strategy should be coupled with move toward a guest-worker program,” editorialized the San Jose Mercury News (3/19/06). “Immigration reform legislation being debated in Congress must regulate the flow of migration and tie it to U.S. labor needs,” declared the Baltimore Sun (3/7/06).
60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley said in a CBS News “Reporter’s Notebook” (CBSNews.com, 12/9/05) that the only way to “stem the tide of illegal immigration” would be to “go to where illegal migrants are working and kick them out” or “come up with some kind of effective guest-worker program.”
Nativist views like those of CNN’s Dobbs (see page 22) and the House of Representatives provided a useful foil to the preferred corporate media solution of “guestworkers.” The result was a narrow public discussion reflecting the terms set by policymakers and lobbyists for business interests, with sops to immigration restrictionists, including increased surveillance and force at the Mexican border, with no remedies for the criminalization and workplace exploitation of immigrants.
The New York Times (5/21/05) summed up this debate: “The arrival last week in the U.S. Congress of a sweeping, bipartisan immigration proposal brought forth the usual conflict between those who want a solution and those who just want an emotional issue to howl about.” The Times was distinguishing between those who accept the business-friendly “reform” proposal and the nativists who reject such a plan; those who see a two-tiered workforce divided by citizenship as not being in the interests of either immigrants or native-born workers are entirely out of the picture.
Selective coverage
News columns as well as opinion commentary attempted to enforce this truncated debate. Consider “U.S. Bill to Broaden Immigration Law Gains in Senate” (3/28/06) by Rachel Swarns, the New York Times beat reporter on the subject. The article covered—and promoted—the late March compromise reached in the Senate Judiciary Committee that used portions of the McCain-Kennedy bill in combination with more restrictionist provisions.
Swarns emphasized that the bill would “legalize the United States’ 11 million illegal immigrants and ultimately . . . grant them citizenship” (if they meet certain conditions), and would “allow roughly 400,000 foreigners to come to the United States to work each year and would put them on a path to citizenship as well.” She reported that the plan “was quickly hailed by Democrats, a handful of Republicans and business leaders, as well as by the immigrant advocacy organizations and church groups that have sent tens of thousands of supporters of immigrant rights into the streets of a number of cities to push for such legislation in recent days.”
Swarns mentioned that the bill “includes provisions to strengthen border security,” and much farther down in the article pointed out that the legislation “would nearly double the number of Border Patrol agents over the next five years, criminalize the construction of tunnels into the United States from another country and speed the deportation of illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico.”
But Swarns missed some other aspects of the Senate Judiciary bill that were later pointed out by the Immigrant Defense Project of the New York State Defenders Association (3/31/06): The bill would expand the types of criminal offenses that lead to mandatory jailing and deportation, allow lifetime detention of immigrants who cannot be deported, fund an additional 10,000 detention beds for immigrants and increase anti-immigrant cooperation between local and federal police.
Nancy Morawetz, a New York University law professor who is sympathetic to immigrants, says that this is a general trend in media coverage. In an email, she points to “lack of attention to unnecessary, inhumane and costly detention policies; restrictions on access to the courts; increase in mandatory grounds for removing noncitizens with status who have been residents most of their lives; [and] criminalization of the undocumented.”
Missing voices
Meanwhile, progressive pro-worker, pro-immigrant or international perspectives have been almost completely absent. For example, with all of the discussion of how the immigration system is “broken,” there has been scant coverage on the massive increase in jailing and deportations in the past 10 years, something that would likely have been brought up had progressive organizations like the Immigrant Defense Project been represented.
Despite Swarns’ claim that the Senate Judiciary bill was “hailed by . . . immigrant advocacy organizations,” many local progressive organizations have publicly objected to various provisions or the entire legislative approach, though their complaints were practically uncited. These include the Break the Chains Coalition, Chinese Staff and Workers Association, Families For Freedom, Friends of Farmworkers and the Drum Major Institute, just to name a few who have presence in the northeastern United States. Though they objected from a variety of perspectives and offered a variety of proposals as fixes, these organizations received a total of four hits in a Google News search of U.S.-based sources for the 30 days prior to March 19, before the massive rally in Los Angeles began calling media attention to immigrant activism.
Instead of viewpoints from such critical groups, or pro-immigrant experts like Morawetz, those who have been selected by the media to represent the “pro-immigrant” side of this debate are generally people like Frank Sharry, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum.
The National Immigration Forum is a pro-immigration lobbying group based in Washington, D.C. It has played a lead role in bringing immigrant groups and unions to support the business-friendly McCain-Kennedy bill, even going so far as to say that it is too light on enforcement provisions (American Prospect, 11/05). A Google News search on March 19 shows that, in the prior 30 days, 98 pieces from U.S.-based sources contained the phrases “National Immigration Forum” and “immigration reform.” On the other hand, the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights—one of the few national pro-immigrant organizations that consistently refused to endorse any of the existing legislative options—received no hits for an analogous search.
Inclusion of a greater diversity of “pro-immigrant” sources might have shifted the focus from D.C. politics to a fuller description of the substance and potential impact of these proposals. The ethnic press has done a better job of this. Consider “McCain Against Amnesty,” a recent cover story in Caribbean Life (3/7/06). The article, covering a rally organized by immigrant lobbyists, states that McCain was “clearly out of touch with the true state of affairs” in New York, because he “spoke as though it’s very easy for immigrants to find affordable English language classes, legal representation, etc.” This level of detail on the real-world effects of the media’s preferred solution on immigrants is virtually absent in mainstream newspaper pages.
In general, the ethnic press has offered a level of detail on immigrant lives that the mainstream media has simply ignored. For example, the March 6 issue of El Diario/La Prensa reported that there has been a 78 percent rise in deportation orders over the past five years, including over 220,000 orders in 2005 alone.
From the replication of the terms of the debate from Washington to the creation of an artificial sense of urgency to pass a bill to the backing of business-friendly proposals that would assist immigrants insofar as they provide cheap labor, segments of the mainstream media did little to serve immigrants, native-born U.S. workers or people in the rest of the world. Only with the shock of the massive demonstration in Los Angeles and elsewhere have the mainstream media finally begun to notice immigrant perspectives that go significantly beyond asking for guestworker status.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2896
ZNet | Activism
The Kennedy-McCain Bill
by Suvrat Raju; May 16, 2006
The past two months have witnessed an explosion in the immigrant rights movement in America. When Representative Sensenbrenner introduced his bill, proposing the large scale deportation of undocumented immigrants, little did he suspect that millions of people would come out on the streets in protest. Los Angeles and Chicago saw the largest demonstrations in their history. Soon other cities followed suit. This movement, full of energy and enthusiasm, holds out the promise of radically changing America.
Predictably, conservative sections of the immigrant leadership have tried to rein in the militant tendencies of this popular outburst. Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles, explained that May 1st could be a made a 'win-win ' day [1] while urging workers to reject calls for a nationwide strike! Earlier, Mahony had written “Only comprehensive reform ... embodied in the principles of ... the Secure America and Orderly Immigration bill, will help solve our current immigration crisis.” [2] In this article, I will attempt to analyze this viewpoint. I will argue that the “Secure America and Order Immigration bill” introduced by Kennedy and McCain is deeply flawed and it would be a serious mistake for the immigrant rights movement to look to this piece of legislation for relief.
A good summary of the Kennedy-McCain(K-M) proposals may be found at the Library of Congress website [3]. Briefly, the bill establishes a new visa type to facilitate future legal immigration. It also offers undocumented immigrants, already present in the country, an opportunity to legalize their status for 6 years with a chance at permanent residency later. While introducing the bill, McCain said ”Homeland security is our nation's number one priority” [4] and, indeed the first section of the bill deals with increased border security.
A quick look at the actual provisions of the bill [5] reveals serious problems. First, consider the opportunities for future legal immigration. The bill proposes the creation of 400,000 new H5-A visas for 'low-skilled workers'. However, according to the latest data compiled by the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of undocumented immigrants over the past 5 years averaged 850,000 per year [6]. Even assuming a steady rate of increase in the number of visas by 15% each year, it will take at least 6 years for the number of visas to catch up with the number of immigrants. Unless, K-M plan to apprehend and turn back hundreds of thousands of people at the border, in a few years there will be several million additional undocumented workers in the US.
Second, the bill ties legal status in the US to employment. If a person is unemployed for 45 days, s/he must leave the country. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics [7], 10.9% of the Hispanic workforce was unemployed at some point during 2004, with the median length of unemployment being 16 weeks(112 days). Within a few years, there would be several million H-5A immigrants in the US. Hence, the 45 day provision would put two to three hundred thousand people at risk of deportation each year [8]. This estimate is quite possibly conservative since it is well known that young workers are subject to a greater incidence of unemployment than older workers [9] and the H-5A population is likely to be younger than the rest of the Hispanic population.
Third consider the clauses dealing with family uni?cation. Currently, US laws place per-country limits on family sponsored visas [10]. Not more than 33,600 family preference visas per year may be given to any one country. The K-M bill raises this limit to 48,000. Given that half a million Mexicans migrate into the US each year, this reform is grossly inadequate.
The senators recognized, probably intuitively, that any attempt at large-scale deportation would be foolish. So, the bill legalizes the presence of undocumented immigrants in the US for a period of up to six years by granting them the status of 'H5-B non-immigrants'. It is hard to critique this in detail, since the exact modalities of the 'H5-B' visa are somewhat unclear. It is evident, nevertheless that this is a recipe for creating second-class citizens who would live in constant fear of losing their status. 'Two offences', according to the Immigration and Nationality Act lead to automatic loss of status [11].
At the end of this mandatory six-year long humiliation, immigrants would be allowed to petition the government for permanent residency. The K-M bill never discusses the issue of accepting the immigrants as full citizens. So, it is a mistake to claim, as some do, that the K-M bill includes a 'path to citizenship'.
In addition to these questions of implementation, the Kennedy-McCain bill overlooks three central issues. First, there is the issue of capitalism! One has often heard, over the past two months, comparisons of the taxes immigrants pay with the social spending they receive. Such comparisons miss the point entirely. As is obvious to any observer of the US economy, under the current (capitalist) system, immigrants are among the most intensely exploited of all workers. This means that while they contribute a lot of labor, the wages they receive in compensation are tiny. If one were to properly tally all the work immigrants do, one would find that it not only overwhelms the proportion of social welfare they receive but is more than enough for them to be provided with comprehensive health-care and many other benefits. In this light, the Kennedy-McCain proposal to ask the Mexican government to foot part of the bill for immigrant health-care is preposterous.
Second, there is the question of imperialism. For the past 200 years, the American government has plundered Latin America and the Caribbean. Capitalist development in North America could not have taken place without the extraction of surplus from other countries. Conversely, this exploitation is also one of the leading causes of poverty in the countries that provide an immigrant population to the US. There is no moral principle that can justify the closure of American borders to victims of American policies.
Third, there is the question of nationalism. A broad argument against current immigration policy must include a radical challenge to the concept of a nation-state. Indeed, imperialist powers have been hypocritically arguing for the past 15 years that human rights supersede sovereignty. I propose that we turn this argument on its head. The right to life and employment is an uncontroversial human right. To accommodate this right, the American nation-state must concede part of its sovereignty.
The perspective, that US imperialism is responsible for immigration and that far from having a right to assert its sovereignty, the US must respect immigrants for the work they do, has immediate consequences. First, it invalidates proposals to militarize the border [12]. Second, it is apparent that the civic-responsibility and English-speaking clauses in the K-M bill are an unacceptable attempt to impose Anglo-Saxon heritage on the immigrant population. Third, K-M's claims to promote economic development in Mexico ring hollow. How can poverty alleviation occur while successive bipartisan administrations continue to push through disastrous free-trade agreements with Mexico? Samir Amin's critique of the millennium development goals is amply applicable here. These proposals are “nothing but empty incantations as long as the policies that generate poverty are not analyzed and denounced and alternatives proposed.” [13]
In summary, the Kennedy McCain bill is a series of insufficient and unworkable proposals. Currently, the Senate and House of Representatives are trying to work out a compromise between the proposals of K-M and Sensenbrenner. Since this compromise will necessarily be worse than K-M, Immigrant rights supporters should reject this move. Rather than relying on minimal legislative reform, we must work to build the movement till it becomes an organized political force capable of winning concessions not only for itself but for people all over the world.
Notes and References
[1] “Positive Action For Positive Change: Suggestions Toward Promoting Immigration Reform On Monday, May 1st, 2006”, Archdiocesan News Archive, April 19,2006
http://www.archdiocese.la/news/story.php?newsid=738
[2] “Called by God to Help”, Roger Mahony, The New York Times, March 22, 2006.
[3] Congressional Record Summary of S1033: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:SN01033:@@@D&summ2=m&
[4] Press Advisory from the O?ce of Senator Kennedy, “Members of Congress Introduce Comprehensive Border Security & Immigration Reform Bill” (May 12,2005).
http://kennedy.senate.gov/ kennedy/statements/05/05/2005512A04.html
[5] Full text of S1033: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:S.1033:
[6] “Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S.” ,Je?rey S. Passel, Pew Hispanic Center, March 2006
http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=61
[7] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/work.t04.htm
[8] If we assume that number of H-5A visas that are given out each year will stabilize at 800,000/year with each visa being valid for 6 years, this leads to an estimate of a stable H-5A population in the US of size 4,800,000. Even if 5% of these workers are threatened with deportation, that number is 240,000.
[9] National Longitudinal Survey of Youth
http://www.bls.gov/nls/y79r20unempbyage.pdf.
[10] See K-M, Title VI: 'Family Unity and Backlog Reduction'.
Also see Immigration and Nationality Act:Section 202(a)
[http://www.uscis.gov/graphics/lawsregs/INA.htm]
[11] See K-M, Title VII: 'H-5B Nonimmigrants' and the Immigration and Nationality Act, Section 212(a)(2). Of course, in line with other paleolithic drug laws, posession of marijuana could also lead to deportation.
[12] In the first section of their bill, Kennedy and McCain gleefully write about the new aerial surveillance technologies they plan to introduce on the border. One must remark on the almost childish fascination that US o?cials share for ineffective high-tech military gadgets.
[13] “The Millennium Development Goals: A Critique from the South”, Samir Amin, Monthly Review, March 2006.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0306amin.htm
Original article is at http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/111714.php Print comments.
Mesoamerica comes to North America: The Dialectics of the Migrant Workers’ Movement
by James Petras Wednesday May 03, 2006 at 07:04 PM
Between March 25 and May 1, 2006 close to 5 million migrant workers and their supporters marched through nearly 100 cities of the United States. This is the biggest and most sustained workers’ demonstration in the history of the US. In all of its 50-year history, the US trade union confederation, the AFL-CIO has never been capable of mobilizing even a fraction of the workers convoked by the migrant workers movement.
Mesoamerica comes to North America: The Dialectics of the Migrant Workers’ Movement
James Petras
Rebelión
Between March 25 and May 1, 2006 close to 5 million migrant workers and their supporters marched through nearly 100 cities of the United States. This is the biggest and most sustained workers’ demonstration in the history of the US. In all of its 50-year history, the US trade union confederation, the AFL-CIO has never been capable of mobilizing even a fraction of the workers convoked by the migrant workers movement. The rise and growth of the movement is rooted in the historical experience of the migrant workers (overwhelmingly from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean), the exploitative and racist experience they confront today in the US and the future in which they face imprisonment, expulsion and dispossession.
The migrant workers movement is engaged in an independent political struggle, directed against local, state and particularly the national government. The movement’s immediate objective is to defeat congressional legislation designed to criminalize employed migrant workers and a “compromise” designed to divide recently arrived workers from older workers. The key demand of the migrant workers is the legalization of all workers, new and old. The choice of direct action methods is a response to the ineffectiveness of the legalistic and lobbying activities of established middle class controlled Latino organizations and the total failure of the labor confederation and its affiliates to organize migrant workers in trade unions or even build solidarity organizations.
To understand the dynamic growth of migrant labor movement in the US and its militancy, it is necessary to analyze the profound structural changes of the 1980’s and 1990’s in Mexico and Central America.
NAFTA, Proxy Wars and Free Markets
Beginning in the 1980’s, the US via the IMF, and its client presidents in Mexico (Salinas, Zedillo and Fox) promoted a “free trade” policy codified in the North American Free Trade Area. This policy opened the door to the massive inflow of heavily subsidized US agricultural commodities undermining local small and medium size farmers. Large-scale foreign investments in retail enterprises, banking and finance led to the bankruptcy of millions of small business people. The growth of free trade industrial zones (maquiladoras) led to the decline of protective social and labor legislation. Foreign debt payments, corrupt privatizations and large-scale growth of precarious employment led to an absolute decline of wage levels, even as the number of Mexican billionaires multiplied. Huge profits and interest payments accruing to US corporations and banks flowed back to the US, as did billions of dollars from corrupt politicians, money laundered by US banks like CITI Corporation.
Displaced and impoverished rural and urban workers soon followed the outward flows of profits and interest. The reasoning according to the “free markets” was that free flows of US capital to Mexico should be accompanied by the free flow of labor, of Mexican workers to the US. But the US did not practice the “free market” doctrine: it pursued a policy of unrestricted entry of capital into Mexico and a restricted policy on labor migration.
The free market policies created a vast reserve army of unemployed and underemployed Mexican labor while the legal restraints on free migration forced the workers to migrate without legal documents.
The huge influx of labor was not simply a result of Mexican or Central American workers seeking higher wages, it was a result of the adverse structural conditions imposed by NAFTA which expelled workers from their workplace. The Mexican free market structure was an ‘empire-centered model of accumulation’, and because it was empire-centered, it became a magnet attracting labor in pursuit of employment in the Empire.
The second major structural feature determining massive migrant worker movements from Central America was the US imperial wars of the 1980’s: the massive US military intervention via proxy armies in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras destroyed the possibility of social reform and viable economies throughout Central America. By financing death squads and promoting “scorched earth” counter-insurgency activity the US drove millions of Central Americans out of the countryside into the squalor of urban slums and overseas to Mexico, the US, Canada and Europe. The US “success” in imposing corrupt right-wing rulers throughout Central America, closed off all options for collective or self-improvement in the domestic economy. The implementation of neo-liberal measures led to even greater unemployment and a sharp decline in social services, forcing many to seek employment in the empire: the source of their misery.
Legacy of Struggle: Migrant Labor Militancy
The first wave of immigrants in the 1980’s in the aftermath of the neo-liberal shock and the military terror sought anonymously any kind of work even under the worst conditions; many hid their militant past but did not forget it. As the flow of migrant workers gained momentum, great concentrations of Latino workers settled in major cities of California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. This led to the creation of a dense network of social, cultural and sports clubs and informal organizations based on previous family, neighborhood and regional ties. New small businesses flourished, consumer power increased, children attended school with clear Latino majorities and numerous radio station were directed to the migrant workers in their own language. Quickly the sense of solidarity grew from the strength of numbers, the facility of communication, the proximity of fellow workers, and above all from the common experience of unregulated and unmitigated exploitation at the hardest jobs and the lowest pay, accompanied by racist attitudes from employers, white workers, police and other public authorities.
The decision by the Congress to add the further threat of imprisonment and mass expulsions occurred at the same time in which the social networks and solidarity within the Latino communities was deepening and expanding. The earlier militancy carried over from the mass popular resistance to the death squads in El Salvador, the taste of freedom and dignity during the Sandinista period in Nicaragua, the multiple militant peasant movements in Mexico came out of the closet and found a new social expression in the mass migrant workers movement.
The convergence of submerged or latent militancy and the demands for labor rights and legal recognition in the new exploitative/repressive context created the impetus for social solidarity of entire communities. Participation included whole families, entire neighborhoods and crossed generational boundaries: high school students joined construction workers, gardeners, garment workers and domestics to fill the streets of Dallas, Texas and Los Angeles, California, with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, much to the surprise of non-Latino observers ignorant of their historical legacy, their powerful social networks and their decision to draw the line now between social existence and massive expulsion.
In summary we cannot understand the massive labor migration from Mexico without examining the massive flow of US capital to Mexico, its destructive impact on the socio-economic relations and the unregulated outflow or remittance of profits and interests back to the US. Likewise we cannot explain the massive long-term flows of labor migrants from Central America to the US without taking into account the massive flow of US arms to the ruling classes of the region, the large-scale destruction of small scale agriculture, the restoration to power of the kleptocratic oligarchies and the reversal of social reforms, especially in Nicaragua.
Central American and Mexican labor migration is a direct result of the victory of the US-led counter-revolution in the region. The emergence of the mass movement of labor migrants, in a sense, is the replay of the earlier struggles between US capital and Mexican and Central American labor on the new terrain of US state politics and with a new set of issues. The continuity of the struggles, in Central America and Mexico and now in the US is found in the common demands for “self-determination” and the common methods of struggle, direct action. This is reflected in the strong working class or ‘popular’ composition of the struggle, and the historical memory of class solidarity.
Significance of the New Mass Migrant Workers Movement (NMMWM)
The emergence of the mass migrant workers’ movement opens a new chapter in the working class struggle both in North America, and Central America. First and foremost it represents the first major upsurge of independent working class struggle in the US after over fifty years of decline, stagnation and retreat by the established trade union confederation. Secondly, NMMWM reveals a new class protagonist (“subject”) as the leading sector in the labor movement, the migrant worker. While in the past the dynamic sectors of organized labor in the private sector (auto, teamsters, steel, and longshore (West Coast)) have lost over 2/3 of their members and now represent only 9% of the private labor force, over 2 million migrant workers demonstrated and manifested the kind of social solidarity, unseen in the US since the 1930’s. Thirdly, NMMWM was organized without a big bureaucratic trade union apparatus, and with a minimum budget on the basis of voluntary workers through horizontal communication. In fact, one of the key factors accounting for the success of the mobilization was that it was largely out of the control of the dead hand of the trade union hierarchy, even as a minority of workers were members of trade unions. Fourthly, the leadership and strategists of the movement were independent of the two major capitalist parties, especially the deadly embrace of the Democratic Party.
Because of their political independence, the NMMWM was in the streets, was critical of both Party policies of expulsion of labor migrants and did not confine itself to the futile action of ‘lobbying politicos’ in the corridors of Congress. The mass migrant workers movement has served, to a certain extent, as a “social pole” attracting and politicizing tens of thousands of high school, community college and even university students especially those of Latin- American origins. In addition, a minority of dissident “Anglo” trade unionists, middle class progressives and clerical liberals has been activated to work with the labor struggles. The NMMWM struggle is political -–directed at influencing political power, national legislation and against the rule of ‘white capital’ directed at criminalizing and expelling ‘brown labor.’
The movement demonstrates the proper approach to combining race and class politics. The emergence of an organized mass labor-based socio-political pole has the potential to create a new political movement, which could challenge the hegemony of the two capitalist parties. The dynamic growth of the migrant workers movement in the US can serve as the basis for an international labor movement (free from the tutelage of the pro-imperialist AFL-CIO) from Panama to the US West, Southwest and southeastern states. Family and ethnic ties can strengthen class solidarity and create the basis of reciprocal support in struggles against the common enemy: the neo-liberal model of capitalism, the repressive state apparatus and legislation South and North.
The positive developments of the NMMWM however face political obstacles to growth and consolidation: First “from the outside” numerous employers fired workers who participated in the first wave of mass demonstrations. Latino workers who were trade unionists received little or no support from the labor bosses.
Secondly, after the mass success of the movements, numerous traditional Latino politicos, social workers, professional consultants, non-governmental organizations and clerical notables jumped on the bandwagon and are active in deflecting the movement into the conventional channels of “petitioning” Congress or supporting the “lesser evil” Democratic Party politicians. These middle class collaborators are intent on dividing the movement to serve their purpose of gaining a political platform for career advancement.
Finally the movement faces the problem of the uneven development of the struggle within the working class and between regions of the country. Most “Anglo workers” are at best passive while probably over half perceive migrant workers as a threat to their jobs, salaries and neighborhoods. The general absence of any anti-racist, class-based education by the trade union bureaucracy makes working class unity a difficult task. The challenge is for the migrant workers to reach out and build coalitions with black, Puerto Rican and Asian workers – as well as a minority of advanced Anglo trade unionists. There is also the pressure from the leaders of the capitalist parties to divide migrant workers, by passing legislation that favors ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ workers, ‘long-term’ versus ‘short-term’ workers, literate versus less literate workers, skilled versus unskilled workers.
Finally there is the need to confront the new wave of large-scale police raids at workplaces and neighborhoods, where hundreds of Latino workers are rounded up and expelled. Today, in Nazi style, entire Latino neighborhoods are closed and the police go on house-to-house searches. The Immigration police have recently escalated their mass ‘round-ups’ at work sites trying to provoke a climate of intimidation. During the week April 21-28, NeoCon Chief of Homeland Security Agency, Michael Chertoff directed the arrest of 1,100 undocumented migrants in 26 states.
Despite these challenges the migrant workers movement is in the ascendancy: on March 25 hundreds of thousands demonstrated; on April 10 over 2 million marched and on May 1, millions more will join massive marches and workers strikes. While the reactionary politicians are holed up in Congress, scheming of new ways to divide and conquer the movement, the Latino people by the millions are in the streets…for their rights, their self-determination and their dignity.
Rebelión
# posted by A. Palacios @ 9:32 PM 
